"Balance, Daniel-san. Always find balance." Mr. Miyagi, "The Karate Kid"
I have been away from this site for exactly a week. I haven't been able to roam or surf or scale the web walls in search of new fun. I have email piling up on three accounts. As someone scary once said, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." I believe he was just getting ready to hack some folks to death in a deserted hotel in Colorado when he said it, but still....it's the message, not the messenger.
And as Homer Simpson once said, "No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy." (Incidentally, he was about to do the same thing, but it's a cartoon so never fear).
I think all of these thoughtful aphorisms point us in the same direction, don't you?
It is perhaps a telling window onto my psychology that I am willing to sacrifice the things that make me happiest. Like coming here after finding funny or quirky or interesting things round and about, polishing them up, tilting them this way or that and showing them to you. That's why I started this in the first place. Likewise, I have spent the last two or three years living in an isolated world of work work and oh yes travel (related to work). And even in traveling around the country, and to points abroad, I still find that I am willing to forego the intriguing parts in favor of alleviating work anxiety by just working harder.
I never considered myself a type-A. I procrastinate like crazy. But I've been very successful, especially in recent years. And yet the things that are most valuable to me, like having a family and so on, are being undermined by the very activity that I thought would facilitate them i.e., being successful, having some scratch and a flashy family sedan (woo Hoo! nothing says "hey baby" like a navy blue Camry...). And yet I fail where my happiness is concerned.
So I find myself at a crossroads of sorts. Well before the New Year, which ensures that I can beat the holiday rush. Have to decide whether I can find that critical balance with the situation I have, or dramatically change the situation. I am a quirky developmentalist in that I am rather uncomfortable with change. Big change (not like, you know, changing underwear or the Brita filter... Those I can handle). But like moving, changing jobs, things like that.
I know, this is terrifically boring navel gazing and exactly the kind of thing that discourages future readership. (Where's all the sex talk we've come to expect [well, all the folks who link here through Google, anyway]? Tell us more about the bonobo and their erotic joie de vivre!! With all the pop-up ads on this bitch, how's about some entertainment already?) I think what I'm doing here is challenging myself in full view of the reading public, those that are left anyway, and I think it might be a Stephen Covey principle that says "write it down and do it already" or something equally pithy. So I'm doing that.
And in this spirit, I took a mighty but wee first step on Friday night, when after a grueling day of interviews in Fort Lauderdale I broke the chains of conformity to past behavior and instead of retiring to my hotel for a solo dinner and some channel surfing and early bed, I went to dinner with a lady I met at the research. Not a client or a colleague, exactly, but someone involved in the process in a local way. Yes I'm being deliberately vague. But it was a revelation for about five hundred reasons, not the least of which I was that I finally took time to smell the roses and man oh MAN what I have been missing. I may have more stories to tell about that in the coming days, but that will do for now.
Of course, in an Alanis Morrisette meets O Henry kind of irony, I wouldn't have been there if it weren't for the work-related travel, and certainly would not have met NG if not for all of the work I've done for this particular client over the last two years. So I will now go and chew on that for a while...
ClothMother_old